


the reality of memory

by ewagan



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Magical Realism, Moderate Longing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-01
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:21:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 16,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23396935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ewagan/pseuds/ewagan
Summary: When autumn comes, Konoha Akinori goes missing.
Relationships: Akaashi Keiji/Konoha Akinori
Comments: 32
Kudos: 94





	1. seeking memory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rielity](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=rielity).



> this has been in the making for well over two years. maybe i'll finish before it's three.

_This year  
I have disappeared. Or I was never there.  
Or I was never here.  
_ — Jane Mead, from World of Made and Unmade

* * *

When autumn comes, Konoha Akinori goes missing.

Akaashi hears about it only by accident, in passing on the news. He doesn't pay it any mind, because he's in the middle of a case that's close to being solved, more concerned with putting the pieces together and finding his missing person, tracing the memory until it was no longer a memory.

It slips his mind, irrelevant and forgotten until his supervisor hands him a folder and a letter, citing it as his new assignment.

The blue folder denotes it as a cold case, but that's hardly surprising. It's the name on it, and Akaashi wonders why this case landed on _his_ desk, of all people.

The letter itself is nothing out of the ordinary really, except that it is. Akaashi can read desperation in each careful stroke, in the spaces where the words pause to breathe. Negative space to frame the request that Akaashi does his best, and Akaashi simply looks at the name of the person he has to find. _Konoha Akinori_. The characters are familiar, his fingers tracing the shape of them from old memory. The attached photo is perhaps two, maybe three years old. Konoha is looking away from the camera, caught halfway between a smile and laughter. Akaashi does not remember Konoha looking like this, thinner and older. He seems distant somehow, as if he doesn’t belong there, then. He doesn’t really look like Konoha at all, if Akaashi is honest.

The case file that comes with the letter is slim. They tell him things he already knows, like Konoha’s birthday, name, nationality. Height, weight, physical description, identifying marks.

And the date of disappearance. _16th October 2013._ Come this autumn, it would have been four years since Konoha had been seen or heard from. Akaashi vaguely remembers how he’d slowly faded out of their circle when he’d moved away for work, and they all had been too busy for one reason or another to keep in touch. That now seems like a lifetime ago.

He reads the file again, lingering over the circumstances of disappearance. There’s hardly anything, only noting he’d last been seen at work, then hadn’t shown up the next day. No one had answered when they’d knocked on the door, and the apartment had been empty when the landlord opened it up for them.

They’d filed it as a cold case after a year. Investigations had turned up nothing, there were no demands for ransom, and the police had their hands full with other cases.

It was as if he’d simply vanished.

Working for Missing Persons was not where Akaashi had pictured his life had been going when he'd graduated from high school. Somehow he'd gone from volleyball player to detective, and it really is baffling if he stops to think about it.

He likes his job well enough, if he's honest about it. It suits him and gives him plenty of time alone, and Akaashi had always been fond of puzzles. It isn't always fun or pleasant, and Akaashi's not sure how to feel about Konoha's case.

He doesn't know where to start, and that's always the biggest problem. There are interviews with Konoha's parents, colleagues, even some friends. But none of them had anything worth saying, only that the disappearance was sudden, that they were worried. _Distressed_ , someone had written in their report of the interview with Konoha's parents.

But why wouldn't they be, after all? Konoha had always been easy to get along with, it makes sense that his disappearance would distress people.

He chases up all the usual avenues first, interviewing colleagues and relatives. Few of them remember Konoha in little more than brief detail, none of them have anything helpful to add to the notes that have already been compiled by Akaashi's predecessor. Konoha had kept to himself, been easy to work with and generally not particularly memorable. He hadn't had anyone he was seeing, nor did he have many friends who knew much about him.

It's frustrating for Akaashi for all of it to come to nothing. But then again, if it had been an easy case, a normal one, it wouldn't have landed on his desk.

With a sigh, he makes a phone call and arranges for an appointment with Konoha’s parents.

The house is familiar from all those days Akaashi had visited, and he bends his head in a graceful acknowledgement when he sees Konoha’s mother again. She looks tired but well, if a little drawn. Akaashi wonders how well she is actually holding up, even after so long now. She offers him tea and they exchange pleasantries for a little, Akaashi asking after Konoha’s sister, who recently had her first child.

“You remember where Akinori’s room is,” she says. Akaashi nods, and takes that as his cue to give her a few moments while he goes up the stairs.

The house hasn't changed much, from what Akaashi remembers. Just a little older, a little more tired. It sighs softly when Akaashi presses his hand against the walls as he climbs the steps, a slow exhalation of all the secrets it must know, if Akaashi would listen. But Akaashi is not here for those.

Konoha’s room is not the same anymore, now converted into a guest bedroom. Gone are the volleyball posters, the scattering of books on the shelves, the pile of laundry in the corner. The bed is neatly made, like all the personality had been stripped from the room. His mother appears behind Akaashi, and goes to the cupboard to pull out some boxes.

“His things.” she says. It is not much, and Akaashi wonders how much Konoha must have changed.

Two of the boxes contain clothes, neatly folded and well kept. The worn material of his Fukurodani jacket, t-shirts that Akaashi remembers seeing, his winter coat, and hoodies. Then there’s his suits, shirts now wrinkled and pressed trousers, rolled-up ties. All of decent quality and make, nothing particularly unexpected. A yukata that Akaashi remembers from that Tanabata festival they had all gone to at Washio’s insistence.

He picks up the Fukurodani jacket, traces the characters carefully. Then he sets it aside.

The next box holds loose papers and notebooks, some of them from high school, some from university. There are scribbles in the margins, careful notes and reminders like _call mum later_ and _ask miyoshi-san about project_. These are all things about Konoha that Akaashi never knew, now slowly being revealed in the boxes he opens.

Underneath the papers is a shoebox with a strange scattering of things that may have been important, but Akaashi cannot guess at their history or significance. He doesn’t know what to make of them, jars and old train tickets.

The last box holds paper, important documents all neatly labelled and filed. His birth certificate, passport, financial documents, employment history. Akaashi doesn’t look through those; there’s likely nothing to be gleaned from them.

He repacks everything, but he puts the Fukurodani jacket together with Konoha’s personal possessions. There are other odds and ends there, things that might be important. But there are so few things, and Akaashi thinks this cannot possibly be all of Konoha’s possessions.

Konoha’s mother is in the doorway, watching him. “You can take those, if you think they’re important.”

“Are you sure?”

She nods, and seems to deflate a little. “If they're of any help at all. Better than leaving them here.”

Akaashi lets the weight of those words settle between them, looks at the boxes that hold Konoha’s life.

“Is this all of it?” he asks her. It seems so little now, when he considers it.

“He threw away a lot of things after university,” she says eventually. “More when he moved. There wasn't much when we packed up his apartment, if you don't count the furniture."

Akaashi nods, and picks up the box. “I’ll take my leave then.”

He sorts through them again later, when he is home alone. Old notebooks and the volleyball jacket. A gingko leaf tucked into the pages of a mostly blank journal, a packet of begonia seeds in a shoebox full of other strange unconnected things. Akaashi uncovers a tiny whale shark keychain, a paper crane with worn creases, like it’s been folded and unfolded over and over. There are some photographs of far-off places, morning glory seeds, and strangely, a tiny jar of dirt. There’s a button that glints in the low light, formerly wrapped in a piece of cloth. If Akaashi had to guess, he would say it’s a second button, but he’s not certain.

There is a collection of train tickets, to Tokyo, to Sendai, to far off places like Kumamoto and Aomori, small towns that Akaashi only vaguely remembers from geography lessons, some that he’d never heard of before. They’re stacked neatly in their own box, no rhyme or reason to their order.

The papers are a strange amalgamation of things. Notes from classes, reminders on post-it notes, a diary that detailed Konoha’s schedule. Doctor’s appointments, birthdays, occasional grocery lists and reminders to run errands.

Then there are the notebooks. _Chemistry, Classical Literature, Physics, English._ Akaashi flips one open and finds neat, comprehensive notes. There’s nothing remarkable about them, beyond Akaashi’s surprise that he’d kept them for so long. Konoha had always been a fairly good student, if not particularly outstanding. Certainly better than Bokuto, who had excelled in all of two subjects and struggled with passing the rest.

 _where are you going_ is written in the margins of one of his notebooks, spirals trailing down the side of the page. The handwriting is familiar, the characters sharp and narrow. Konoha always had a preference for fine nibs; Akaashi remembers from the year they had gifted him a whole packet of those ridiculous pens he used to go halfway across the city to get.

“Where did you go, Konoha?” Akaashi murmurs, running his finger over the words. “Where are you going?”

Sitting amidst the collection of Konoha’s things, Akaashi’s no closer to any answers than he was when the case had first landed on his desk.

It’s Konoha, but this isn’t a Konoha that Akaashi knows at all. He thinks of the photo of Konoha, the way Konoha looked like he was far, far away, the way Akaashi almost didn’t recognize him when he’d first seen the picture.

Maybe he’s not looking for the right person at all.

Tokyo station is busy, but Akaashi expected this. There's probably no evidence to be found but Akaashi thinks it can't hurt, retracing Konoha's most recent journey. There wasn't a return ticket, so Akaashi wonders if Konoha had ever come back, if he'd disappeared into some small town and changed who he'd become.

It doesn't sound like a thing Konoha would do, but then again, if Akaashi's learned anything from this case at all, it's that he doesn't really know Konoha at all. He'd made assumptions that had led him nowhere, based on things he knew from almost ten years ago. None of that has served him well, so perhaps assuming he knows nothing at all would be better.

Akaashi knows something about retracing steps; it's what makes him so good at his job, and especially with cold cases. So he gets on the train and makes his way to his seat, watching as the train begins to pull out. He thinks about Konoha, getting on a train like this, watching the landscape pass by. The rhythm of it is soothing and easy.

It makes it easy to slip away, until he has Konoha opposite him, watching him with a careful expression. He looks like he's about to fade away, that if Akaashi doesn't keep hold of this thread it will slip too.

There are rules to this. He cannot make something happen. He can only look and see what was there, gather what little remains still.

It is only tracing a memory. And yet, it doesn't feel quite like it.

“I’m looking for you,” he tells Konoha. Konoha only looks at him, faintly bemused.

“Are you now,” he murmurs. Akaashi has no reason to believe that Konoha can hear him, or see him. But he wonders.

“I don't know where to start looking.” Akaashi says.

Konoha tilts his head, a faint smile on his lips. “But you’ve already found me, haven't you?”

Akaashi tries to formulate a kind of reply, but then there's a voice announcing the next stop, and Akaashi loses the thread of it. When he looks again, Konoha is gone.

The small town offers him no clues. No one remembers anyone matching Konoha's description, though the old man who runs the local restaurant is only too eager to tell him about the rest of the town.

Hayashi-san’s studio where he dyes paper and cloth alike, always something colourful hanging outside to dry. Minako-chan’s restaurant, where she handmakes all her udon and is one of the things people often visit the town for. The shrine and the sprawling courtyard, as much a part of the forest as the trees are. The mushroom farm that Hirano-san owns, where he lets you pick your own if you bring a box.

It’s not an unusual place, Akaashi thinks. But perhaps that was the point, that it was ordinary.

Still, he goes. To the shrine where he can feel eyes on him, where he claps his hands together to announce himself and asks for their blessings. To the colourful clothesline of Hayashi-san, where sheets and sheets of cloth flutter in various shades of purple. To the old house at the edge of the town, where he can feel memories tugging and begging to be seen. 

Just not the one he is looking for.

His office is quiet when he makes it in to collect the case file and update it, adding notes from what little he’s learned so far.

_Case reopened on 19th September 2017. Personal items collected for further investigation. Known to take long train journeys. Perhaps left and never returned?_

It’s barely two lines, and Akaashi doesn’t know what to make of any of it. He could add his encounter with Konoha into his notes, but he hesitates. He’s still not sure what is happening during these encounters, or if they mean anything at all. If they will continue, or if he had simply dreamed it. 

He’d hoped that maybe writing it out would clarify some things, but anything else feels like he’d rehashing old ground, going over what someone else had previously done. So what should he do next? Is there a memory for him to find, something he can uncover? Where would he find it, when nothing he has tried so far has yielded any results?

None of it makes any kind of sense. But if it had made sense, then Akaashi wouldn’t be the one working on it.

Sighing, he closes the case file and puts it back in the drawer.

There's something strange about how a whole life can be held in a box, Akaashi thinks. He's sorting through Konoha's things again, wondering about the rest of it. Even as minimal and tidy as Akaashi is, he thinks he owns more things than Konoha does, if only out of necessity. But their significance is lost on Akaashi, who stares at the faded packet of begonia seeds that said they should be planted before 2015, preferably early spring. The paper crane that was threatening to fall apart, and Akaashi wonders what secrets have been folded into them.

He tries to remember things about Konoha as he sorts it all, trying to make sense of it. The high school girlfriend, whom he had broken up with a few months into university. His sisters, whom he'd been fond of and who had doted on him in turn, despite the age gap. His parents, who loved him and whom he loved in return, how he’d wanted to make them proud. He doesn't remember what Konoha majored in, but he'd liked physics and had been good at it. He didn't want to be an engineer though; Akaashi remembers that conversation.

He flips open notebooks, skims notes as old lessons come back to him. Velocity times mass equals momentum. Lithium is the most unstable element in the periodic table. 「掻き探れども 手にも觸れねば」 _And reaching out, the questing hand finds nothing._

He remembers Konoha with a volume of _Manyoshu_ in hand during one break, reciting poetry like he was reading for a karuta match, grinning as Bokuto had watched him wide-eyed. Komi had asked him when he’d learned to do that, and Akaashi remembers the half smile on Konoha’s face as he said _I’m a man of many talents, unlike Bokuto._ How they had laughed then, how indignant Bokuto had been. But he’d laughed with them despite his indignance, and made Konoha buy him ice cream after practice as an apology.

He can almost see Konoha next to him on the train going home, that faraway look he’d gotten sometimes. But there’s nothing in the notebooks beyond tidy notes, occasional memos about homework or reminders to study for tests. Unfilled pages from where he’d run out of notes to take, the school year having ended while something waited to happen.

There's a tug of memory here, faint and beyond Akaashi, almost another mystery to be solved. He flicks through the empty pages of Konoha’s old literature notebook and finds a piece of notepaper tucked inside, folded like it had been forgotten. The page is covered with Konoha’s handwriting; tight and cramped like he had been running out of space, even though the page was only half full.

_The days are passing now and unsteadily so. I find myself losing track of things. It feels like New Year’s was only last week, but next week I’m going home for obon. Time is slipping away, and some days I feel like I too, am slipping away with the days that pass. I try to write, to remember. But they blur together nonetheless. I can’t seem to hold it together._

_Sometimes I wish I could go back. Undo all this. Become someone else. Or maybe just disappear, between one day and the_

The words end abruptly, like Konoha had been interrupted while writing, then had folded away and forgotten this. It makes Akaashi wonder if he'd planned for this. It's not really out of the question that he'd disappeared voluntarily. And if he did, did Akaashi have the right to force him back into a life he'd apparently not wanted?

He visits Konoha’s mother again to update her on the case's progress. She gets him to sit down at the dining table, and he watches as she makes tea. There are new photos on the walls, and Akaashi studies them as he waits.

Graduation photos, family holidays, events. Faces creased in smiles, eyes scrunched up, frozen in a moment that cannot be replicated. Konoha is laughing in most of them, and Akaashi can track him from child to man in these photos, see the pride of his parents and the fondness in his sisters. Then the space he seems to leave in the photos that are absent of him, that must have been taken after he’d disappeared. His younger sister’s wedding, a grandmother’s birthday. A quiet absence that seems to ache through even in the photos.

The clink of the teapot being set down pulls him from his thoughts, even as Konoha’s mother takes the chair opposite him.

"You miss him," Akaashi observes.

She shrugs, a sort of helpless gesture. "How do I not?" It reminds him of something his grandmother had once told him as a child, now a faint memory. How could you not miss someone when they had been a part of you?

“Do you think he was unhappy?" Akaashi asks.

“Do we ever truly know how anyone else feels?” she asks. There is a long moment that hangs between them, until she speaks up again. “Akinori always said he was tired when I asked. His job was demanding, he worked a lot. He never directly said anything, and maybe I was worrying too much.” The expression on her face is distant, recalling memory. “He didn’t want me to worry about him,” she says softly. “And then he was gone, and I wondered if I should have pressed harder.”

“Would it have helped?”

She shakes her head. “It doesn't stop me from thinking about the what ifs and wherefores. Even now, and I probably will never stop.”

She sits across him while the late afternoon sun pours in behind her, and Akaashi thinks he is glad that Konoha cannot see her at this moment.

“It really is nice today, don’t you think?”

Akaashi thinks he should stop being surprised by Konoha's appearances now. But he still is, even as he presses his fingers together. Konoha's sitting across him, looking older and more tired. Maybe it's just Akaashi’s imagination, but he looks almost sad.

“It is. It was a nice trip,” Akaashi says. He doesn't ask where Konoha is. Konoha either can’t or won’t tell him, and Akaashi thinks that their encounters are few and rare enough without trying to push for something that only cuts their time short.

“I’m sorry we never got to do that road trip.” Konoha says, at last.

“Which one?”

“You know, that one we talked about for summer holidays in my second year of university.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” 

Akaashi shrugs, looking out the window. They’re passing through a city now, all tall buildings and small houses, clothes flapping in the wind. People waiting at the crossings for the train to pass, then they're out in open fields again. “You know, Yukie had a spreadsheet of what to eat where in which city?”

Konoha lets out a startled laugh. “Why am I surprised?” he wonders, shaking his head. “Of course she did.” Akaashi smiles.

“I think she showed it to me. It was quite comprehensive.”

“She always was very organised,” Konoha agrees, a fond smile curling around his lips. Akaashi wonders if there’s something there, that maybe he should look up Yukie after all, if she knows something. It’s as good an excuse as any, he hasn’t seen her in years now.

“Would you go somewhere with me one day, Konoha?” Akaashi asks. Konoha regards him with a curious look, like he’s trying to figure something out.

“Aren’t we already going somewhere now?” Konoha asks, even as the train jolts as if to remind Akaashi where they are. Akaashi frowns and Konoha's smile turns into a crescent moon, unreadable and distant.

Then he is gone, as if he had never been sitting across Akaashi at all.

Akaashi’s finger twists around the phone cord as he waits, 

“Hello?” The voice is familiar, if not quite what Akaashi remembers. But then, Akaashi has been learning recently only how too fallible memory is, even his own.

“Yukie-san? It’s Akaashi. Akaashi Keiji.”

“Akaashi-kun? I haven’t heard from you in ages! How are you doing?” Her smile is evident over the phone, and Akaashi feels vaguely guilty about how he’d lost touch with her.

“I’m quite well, thank you. What about you?”

“I’m doing great! It’s been such a long time, hasn’t it?” Yukie laughs. “Anyway, why are you calling? Somehow I doubt this is a social call.” There’s a wry note in her voice, and Akaashi can’t help but wonder at how some things simply don’t change.

“Actually, I’d like to meet you and ask you about some things, if that’s alright.”

“Can I ask what this is about?” Yukie’s tone is slightly worried now, and he can picture it, the way she used to frown at them when they were pushing too hard after practice.

“Nothing to worry about, Yukie-san.” Akaashi hurries to reassure her. “I’d prefer to talk face-to-face, that’s all.” Akaashi wants to see her reaction, because sometimes people betray themselves. It’s not that he doesn’t trust Yukie, but there’s no harm in being careful.

“Hm.” Yukie sounds considering, and Akaashi waits for her. “I can only do dinner on Saturday. It’s busy at work right now.” She sounds somewhat apologetic, and suddenly rather tired. Akaashi can’t even remember what is it that Yukie did when she went to university, and he feels guilty about this.

Perhaps it is good to see her again, if only to catch up with their lives, and to remember all these things that have slipped away from him.

“That sounds great, Yukie-san.” he says. “I’ll text you the details?”

“Will you be buying, my sweet kouhai?” she asks teasingly. Akaashi hesitates to answer, because he remembers Yukie easily matching Bokuto the few times they had gone out to eat as a team. Yukie’s laughter is response enough. “Don’t worry about it, Akaashi-kun. We’ll figure it out.”

Akaashi hopes they do.

Yukie is almost as he remembers her, and she is warm in her greeting. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail and she looks like she's done well for herself since they left school, since he fell out of contact with everyone.

After they order entirely too much food for two people, Yukie turns to Akaashi expectantly.

“So what brought this on, Akaashi-kun?” she asks, stirring her drink with her straw. “You're not one for sentimentality.”

Akaashi offers her a wry smile as he turns his cup in his hands. “I'm looking into Konoha's disappearance.”

Abruptly, Yukie loses any kind of cheer. Akaashi takes it in, the way her lips thin and how she stops playing with her drink, the line of tension in her shoulders.

“He's been missing a long time,” she says. “Why now?”

“His case is on my desk.” Akaashi fiddles with his cup, tracing patterns in the condensation.

“I see.” They sit in contemplative silence, while the rest of the restaurant chatters and murmurs around them.

Akaashi cracks first. “Can you tell me anything?” He knows that Konoha and Yukie had been good friends, but then Konoha had been friends with all of the first string, and a fair amount of the second string too.

Yukie stares at her hands. “I don't know what to tell you, Akaashi-kun.” she says, like she's confessing. “It's just been so long now and I remember worrying about him and for him, but you also know how he was. Always telling us not to worry, that he's fine."

Akaashi remembers; how many times Konoha had laughed something off, let it slide. _Not a big deal_ , he would say, that half-smile on his face. He'd always been very easy-going, fitting himself in seamlessly, picking up the slack where it was needed.

"I guess he was, until he wasn't." Yukie says softly, almost sadly. And that was just it, wasn't it? Somewhere between then and now, Konoha had not been fine. Somewhere between then and now, he had disappeared, and left a space shaped by his absence.

Suddenly, he wants to apologise to Yukie for not noticing, for not realising. For not being there for her when it happened, or that it hadn’t mattered until now. Akaashi had failed to notice, despite all the care and attention to detail people praise him for. He’s not sure if he feels guilty about it, but it weighs heavy on him, and makes him wonder what else he has let pass him by.

"I don't have anything to offer you," Her hands are folded around her mug, her mouth an unhappy line. "But I hope you find him, because he was my friend, and yours."

He's on the last train home, watching lights and concrete flash by. Perhaps it's his imagination, but he can see Konoha's face reflected in the window, absent minded and faraway. But then he turns to look at Akaashi, steady and measured. _Find me,_ he almost seems to say. But then the train screeches into the next station and Akaashi can only stare at the window, at the empty platform beyond.

How do you find someone who didn't want to be found? Where do you begin?

He visits Konoha’s old apartment, though he can’t go in anymore. It’s been leased to a new tenant, a young couple who just got married. Akaashi wonders if that could have been Konoha’s life instead, if he’d wondered about getting married, having children, if that had at all been something Konoha wanted at all.

Sitting in a park across from the apartment block, Akaashi considers all the things he has learned so far about Konoha.

He’d disappeared without a trace, without any clues. He’d gone many places, done a lot of long journeys. He had his share of regrets, if all the encounters Akaashi had with him are anything to go by. He may not want to be found at all. If he’s entirely honest, Akaashi’s not even sure if he’s speaking to Konoha sometimes, or just a memory of him.

Despite everything, it feels like Konoha's disappearance was a choice. Akaashi can't think of where he could have gone, without money or documents. He'd even left his seals behind.

So if Konoha had chosen to disappear, why? There had been nothing wrong in his life, or reason for him to disappear. It had been the kind of life that people expected after university—moving out, finding work, socialising with his colleagues, occasional holidays and visits home, the odd event here and there.

Akaashi is aware of the expectations his parents have for him, that society has for him. He's always been good at doing what was expected of him; he graduated high school and went to university, started a job and worked his way into where he is now, dated a girl for a while until they broke up. All things expected of him. His mother has subtly suggested setting up omiai for him and he's agreed to it, if only to keep her happy.

But he's wondering again if this is what he wants at all, watching the lights flicker on in the apartment block. It all seems pointless, doing as you expected of you, living a life you didn't want for yourself.

Maybe that was why Konoha left.

He closes another case. This one is easier, a memory to trace and someone to find. The family is grateful when their child is returned to them, and her older brother comes to stand with Akaashi while the parents fuss over her.

“Thank you, Akaashi-san.” he says. Takahashi Yuuto, Akaashi remembers. He’d been the one to ask that the case be opened again, passed to Akaashi. When Akaashi had met him, he had carried a quiet sort of grief around with him. It is lesser now, even as his parents cry over his sister while she clings to them.

"I'm glad to have found her," he says simply.

"It's funny and sad how easily we lose things and people, isn't it? How we realise their value only after they are lost.” Yuuto watches his parents, detached. “How happy we should be, to find them again.”

He doesn't look very joyful, Akaashi thinks. Only a kind of sad, for having lost it in the first place. Like in the losing, he had lost something else of himself, and the finding would not undo loss that had already occurred.

_Sometimes I wish I could go back. Undo all this._

Akaashi wonders if maybe, just maybe, Konoha had succeeded in doing just that.

Akaashi has made a career of finding what was lost, of following memory upon memory upon memory. And for all his searching and looking, he still doesn't know how to go about finding Konoha.

Every step takes him back to the trains somehow, to bus stations and parking lots, empty and absent of anyone or anything. He doesn't know what to make of it, that he keeps coming to places like these.

He goes through Konoha's things again, organises the many train tickets in some kind of order, marks their destinations on a map to see if there's a pattern to it somehow. There must be _something_ , because Konoha cannot have just disappeared without reason, to nowhere.

Between departure and arrival, if he could trace all these steps Konoha took, go to places he’d gone, then maybe he might understand. If he looked harder, if he could see enough of the pieces, then he would know.

If he were somewhere, then Akaashi would find him.

In absence, memory. Akaashi’s on a train to Aomori, just so he can see what Konoha saw. He wonders if Konoha fell asleep on the train, if it had been raining the way it is now. The raindrops streak past, a broken fractal across the windows that reflect the interior of the train. He can almost picture Konoha sitting across from him, head propped on his hand. Their eyes meet in the reflection of the glass, and Akaashi turns to look.

Konoha’s there, now watching Akaashi with steady eyes, the way he used to watch the ball during practice and in matches. 

“You’re here.” he says. 

“I am.” he agrees, turning to look out the window again. His head rests against the glass. He looks like Akaashi remembers him, all long limbs and lanky grace. But there’s something detached about him as well, as if he isn’t quite here anymore.

“You keep leaving.” Akaashi finally says, turning to look out the window. There’s not much to see, between the rain and the darkness. He wagers they’re somewhere near Sendai now. Halfway points, in-betweens. 

“It’s easy to leave.” Konoha replies. “It’s hard to stay. Harder to come back.”

Akaashi considers this. “It is.” They sit in silence for a few minutes.

“We keep going around in circles, Akaashi.” Konoha looks impossibly tired and sad in the reflection. “When something ends, another begins. What happens in between?” But there’s the sound of glass shattering and Akaashi knows something is not right. 

Konoha’s reflection breaks apart, streaking away with the rain. When Akaashi turns to look, but there’s no one there, no trace of anyone having been there at all.

Konoha’s gone.

Aomori’s a city, that’s the best way Akaashi can put it. It’s colder and Akaashi wishes he’d put on a thicker sweater, but he warms up as he starts walking, taking in the bare trees and the snow covered pavements. What was Konoha looking for here? Or did he come for no reason at all?

Maybe he’s overthinking it. Konoha has told him that more than once before. _You don’t have to think so hard about these things,_ especially after tense matches. _Just take it as it comes._

He thinks about the ease that Konoha used to carry himself with, how he’d rolled with Bokuto’s exuberance and sulkiness alike, content to let it come and go. He remembers Konoha’s half-smile and the way he could slide in and out of being what people needed, when they needed. Konoha had always said the trick of it was not to think so much, to plan and to worry. Just keep an eye out, and it would make itself clear.

So he takes in a deep breath, lets the cold air fill his lungs as he starts walking. Maybe he’ll figure it out, if he keeps walking, if he just looks and stops analysing and wondering about everything.

Eventually, he gets himself a coffee and sits on a bench, even though it’s far too cold for it. He still doesn’t know what Konoha came here for, but he thinks maybe it doesn’t matter.

He meets Yukie for dinner a week after he gets back from Aomori, travel worn and distracted. Yukie’s lovely in a cream coat, and she waves enthusiastically when she spots him in front of the restaurant. They’re promptly seated and given menus, Yukie asking after him and the case.

“You’re spending a lot of time on this,” Yukie observes. Her hair now is a stylish bob, framing her face. She still looks sleepy but her eyes are sharp as she takes Akaashi in, his rumpled jacket and his messy hair. He’s still thinking about the train to Aomori, turning Konoha’s words over in his head. Where is home to Konoha, he wonders.

He doesn’t explain it to her, the compulsion, the need to find Konoha. He’s one of their own, even though the years have passed now and they’ve all gone their own ways. He thinks she understands, because she’s always been sharper than she lets on and she still knows them all far too well. So he just smiles at her ruefully and shrugs. “My colleague said that too, the other day,” he tells her.

“At least someone else is worrying about you.” Akaashi thinks she’s too kind, still looking out for them even after all this time. 

“I went to Aomori the other day,” he says. She raises an eyebrow, pausing in her perusal of the menu. He shrugs, suddenly unable to explain why he went. “I wanted to.” The look she gives him tells him she doesn’t believe him, not completely. 

She sighs a little and pats his hand. “Come on, let’s order. I'm starving.” Her smile is wicked as she flags the waiter down. She starts rattling things off and Akaashi wonders if she’ll wind up ordering the whole menu.

Perhaps some things would never change, despite the passage of time.

He's turning over the ticket, the ink starting to wear off from all the handling, edges gone soft. The wind is loud outside his apartment, and Konoha is examining his potted plant across him.

"You should water it," he says. Akaashi looks at it consideringly, and tilts his head in a concession. He's not sure when he last watered it, and it definitely looks more than a little wilted.

He goes to the kitchen and fills a small cup with water, carries it back to the table and pours some into the pot, watching as it disappears into the soil before he adds a little more. Konoha watches as he does this, and Akaashi wonders how Konoha is here, but he’s also afraid to ask. He’s learned now to be careful about what he asks and he doesn’t, because he’s not really sure how to find Konoha anymore. Nothing he’s tried has worked, and he’s running out of ideas.

"Can you come back?" Akaashi asks, lacing his fingers together.

"Maybe. I'm not sure," Konoha says.

Akaashi feels like he's asking the wrong question again. It has happened so often now, perhaps he shouldn't be surprised. So he considers it, turns the question around in his head.

“Do you want to come back?” he asks, and Konoha looks at him, expression faintly bemused.

“What would I come back for, Akaashi?”

He doesn’t have an answer for that.

Memory, meeting. Akaashi ponders them all, wondering if he's just been seeing things all this time.

Memory has always been surprisingly fallible, overwritten time and again each time you remember it. Konoha has only ever shown up when Akaashi's mind has been on him, and he never looks quite like how Akaashi remembers him.

It makes him wonder if he really knows or remembers Konoha at all. The pull of memory is so faint now, Akaashi has trouble concentrating enough to follow it.

But it slips past him and Akaashi wonders if this is how it will end. He doesn't know where to look anymore, and all of it doesn't seem to make any sense. Konoha doesn't seem to want to be found, and Akaashi is only too aware how difficult it can be to find someone who didn't want to be found.

Only now, it will be a loss to him the way it hadn't been when Konoha had first left. Now, with bits and pieces of Konoha's life in boxes around him, in this period of time he had spent learning and trying to relearn him, Akaashi has found something to lose.

The ache of it surprises him.

“What if he doesn't want to come back?”

Yukie has a blueprint spread out over her dining table, and Akaashi is watching her wave around the longest ruler he’s ever seen from the safety of the kitchen counter. The pot is simmering gently while Akaashi pleats gyoza for their dinner; Yukie had roped him into making them while she did some work, and he didn’t really mind.

This makes her pause and turn to look at him, a frown on her face.

“What do you mean by that?” she asks.

“Hypothetically,” he starts. “Just hypothetically, if I’ve been talking to him, and he’s said he doesn't want to come back, should I keep looking for him?” He stares at the gyoza in his hands, the neat folds of it, the tidy lines of them on a plate, dusted lightly with flour. 

Yukie is quiet for a long moment, her hands paused above the drawings. “Are you saying he chose to disappear?”

Akaashi hesitates. “I think he might have,” he admits, softly. He places the last gyoza on the plate and dusts his hands, then looks up at Yukie.

She looks stricken, like the thought hadn't occurred to her before. The idea that Konoha had chosen to leave, that he didn’t want to come back.

“Was he that unhappy?” she asks, her voice soft.

“I don’t know, Yukie-san.” He reaches out and fiddles with one of the gyoza, pressing the pleats tighter. “But the more I look into the case, the more it feels like he was looking for something, or somewhere else to be. Someone else to be.”

She turns back to her drawings, her hair hiding her face. “Then maybe, we failed to see what was happening when it was happening,” she says softly. “In that, we failed him.”

The thought of that sits heavy.

Memories are finicky, fragile things. Akaashi knows from experience, from living and reliving them, following their trail. It’s strange what people remember and don’t, how they reconstruct memory once more, and in that, the markers that guide him.

How bright the sky is, the way the streamers flutter in the air. The smell of an incoming storm, the heaviness of the air. He follows them, lets them draw him deeper and deeper into memory.

It sweeps him up, the feeling of nothing, nothing. Following the paths laid out for him, he should be happy, shouldn't he? A decent job that paid well, his parents were proud and happy and concerned. He sends them money every month even though they say they don't need it, they just want him to be happy. His mother's voice asking him _are you alright, are you eating well, we’re worried about you_.

His younger sister visiting him for a weekend. She just got engaged and she's so happy, incandescent with it. _Aniki, when will you get married?_ she asks, like she wants him to share her happiness, to know the kind of happiness that made her shine so. 

_Soon,_ he tells her, even though he doesn't have a girlfriend now, that the very thought of trying to find one feels like too much to do. Maybe he should say yes to his co-worker’s request he join them on mixers, or to his aunt’s suggestion of an omiai.

He’s looking up train times, he should be getting a ticket to Fukuoka for a business trip. But what if he went somewhere else instead? What if he booked a ticket to Sakata? What if he went to Kagoshima, went as far south as he could?

A train going somewhere, a familiar rumble and screech as the train pulls up to yet another station he doesn't recognise. It's so easy, he thinks. It should be so easy, this path to happiness he'd always known. Find a good job, marry a nice girl, have a happy family.

Why does it feel so difficult then?

The memory ends abruptly and it's exhausting. Akaashi is gasping like he'd forgotten how to breathe, and Konoha is sitting across him. Already he is fading, the lights shining through him.

“Time is running out,” Konoha tells him.

“What do you mean by that?” Akaashi asks. He's taken to sitting in the subways at night, watching as carriages fill and empty, ebbing and flowing with people. Sometimes Konoha will appear, sometimes he won't. But it soothes Akaashi nonetheless, the coming and goings, the transience of it all.

Tonight, Konoha looks exhausted. Konoha shakes his head, his gaze distant, seeing something Akaashi can't. “You’re running out of time,” he says again, softer this time. He's almost gone now, and if Akaashi blinks—

“Konoha, wait—” but Konoha is gone, and Akaashi is left alone to watch lights pass as the train passes through stations, to wonder if he's ever going to figure this out, or if Konoha is right and he's out of time.

New Year’s eve. The trains are full of people going to shrines at this hour, eager to receive their first fortune of the year. Next to him, a pair of girls are all dressed up in their kimonos. They laugh and chatter, excitement humming in the air as they talk about school, about the shows currently airing on TV, about their fortunes for the year.

Akaashi wonders when was the last time he’d felt like that—excited, pleased even. He’d always been someone who preferred to maintain an even keel, a far cry from Bokuto’s wild swings between exuberance and depression. Even during his last breakup, he’d woken up the next morning and went to work. No tears, no fuss. Work had mattered more than the ending of a long term relationship, especially one that had been headed towards marriage.

Later he’d thought about it and he wondered how he hadn’t realised they had been growing apart, that their relationship seemed marked more by absence than presence, trains passing through the same station for brief moments. It makes him wonder how many things he’d simply let slip past him, moving on without him like he’d let his old friendships fade gently, quietly, only realising that they were gone after.

Endings were so terribly, terribly quiet.

In the loudness of the train and people around him, he wonders if something is ending now and again, he has failed to notice it.

The week after New Year’s, he throws himself into work.

He solves another case, this one ending in a forest rimed with frost, bones at his feet. It’s always an unpleasant, if not entirely unexpected occurrence in his line of work. The not knowing is always the worst part, because it leaves people in stasis, in suspension. Waiting to start again, to move on.

He thinks of Konoha’s mother at the dining table, the late afternoon that had lit up the grief she carried. The fall of Yukie’s hair as it hid her face, that aching feeling that had taken up residence in his chest.

He wonders if he's going to see Konoha again, given how tired he'd looked the last time Akaashi had seen him. What does it cost him each time he shows up? Akaashi is only too familiar with the exhaustion that comes from dabbling with things just beyond reality.

He’s up late rifling through Konoha’s old notebooks again, relearning old concepts he’d banished in favour of more important things. They feel so familiar, comfortable even though they are worded somewhat differently, tiny notes in the margins explaining more complicated things in simpler concepts.

When he looks up, Konoha's face is reflected in the glass of the sliding doors even as the rain starts falling, soft and almost soundless. He turns, and Konoha is next to him. He can see Konoha's mouth forming the words, but he can't hear the words, can barely make it out even as Konoha seems to lose substance with each passing moment.

"I can't hear you," he says quietly. Konoha just looks more tired now, and Akaashi wants to reach out, try to grasp him. It's silly, but it feels sometimes like if he could grab hold of Konoha, he could pull him back here, make him real again.

It's silly, but it's worth a try. Akaashi reaches out, seeking like he might a memory. But before his hand can touch Konoha's, Konoha wavers and disappears altogether.

The rain falls outside, and Akaashi wonders if his last chance has slipped through his fingers, because he had hesitated too long.

With investigative work, there's a distinct difference between active cases and cold cases. Active cases can often take on a new dimension; there are people involved who might bring forward evidence, rephrase something that gives him a new angle to work with.

With a cold case, Akaashi is given all the pieces at the start, and somehow he has to figure out the picture they form. Never mind that he is missing half the picture, or there is no way to get anything new. He has to look harder at what he does have, and see what he can make of it.

Months and months of reading and rereading Konoha's school notes, travelling back and forth Japan on trains, of seeking memory and failing, of trying to piece together a life then a disappearance, and Akaashi still doesn't quite have it.

He’s almost there, and the pieces are clicking together. But he’s still missing something terribly important, something that he has overlooked despite his careful examination of everything. 

In his absence, Akaashi is learning more about Konoha than he knew all through high school, for all their supposed closeness. Space is relative after all, and in all these spaces Konoha has left behind, Akaashi is closer to him than he has ever been.

And for all this newfound familiarity, Akaashi can’t seem to find the last piece to complete the picture, to figure out where Konoha has gone.

The picture of Konoha that sits on Akaashi’s desk makes it clear, the way he looks like he’s not really there anymore. As if he were slipping from reality, slipping in between the cracks.

Slipping through the cracks. _Disappear, between one day and the—_

 __—next. Between one place and another.

_In between._

Suddenly, it starts coming together. Akaashi’s heard these stories before, of people who had slipped through the cracks. Few people believed them, but Akaashi knows better. After all, what he can do is something like that, reaching for the things that linger in between the cracks, for the things people leave behind, forget.

The train tickets, moving from one place to another. In between, where nothing is quite so clear, when they’re moving but not. The way Konoha had always looked like he was never here nor there, how Akaashi usually saw him in reflections first. All the clues had been there, but it had taken so long for him to put it all together.

But now he knows what to do, the final piece finally falling into place.

He goes to Kenma, because Kenma’s always known these things better than he has. Not many people knew about these spaces, let alone how to slip through them. That Konoha had known enough to do it is slightly terrifying in itself. He’d never indicated he’d had any knowledge or interest in it, much less any ability for it. But Konoha’s full of secrets, and Akaashi thinks he’s barely begun to scrape the surface of them.

“What do you know about the in-between spaces?” he asks. Kenma frowns briefly, his fingers paused over his keyboard. It doesn’t take long until he figures it out.

“You found him,” he says, like a statement of fact.

“I think I have,” Akaashi says, his fingers laced together tightly, holding in his anxiety. “I’m not sure, but I think so.”

“So now you need to pull him out,” Kenma says. He looks thoughtful, typing something down.

“Where should I start?” Akaashi asks. He is so close, and he is getting impatient.

“There are places where it’s easier. Where the fabric of time and space is less solid,” Kenma tells him. “Places where things end.”

“Or begin.”

“Or begin, yes,” Kenma agrees. Akaashi feels like he’s been going around in circles these few months, where endings are beginnings and beginnings are endings, with little to no change in between.

“Where would I find places like these?”

Kenma side-eyes him, then sighs. “Try a train station. Or a parking lot. Liminal spaces.” 

“How do I get him back?”

“Ask Kuro. Kuro would know best.”

Beginnings and endings, an endless circle. It feels like he’s been chasing Konoha for so long now, uncovering layer after layer. But it’s easy to guess now, where Konoha has gone.

He calls Kuroo and Kuroo comes, rides in trains with him while they talk. Akaashi explains it to him, and Kuroo listens. They go round in circles, the train rattling its way through a city. Meguro. Gotanda. Osaki. Shinagawa. All so familiar from having lived all his life in this city, and yet he's reassessing them now, and all that he knows.

“You realise people don’t do these things unless they don’t want to be found?” Kuroo asks, after they sit in silence for a few stops.

“Yes.” But Akaashi’s almost certain of it now, that Konoha wants to be found.

“You realise he might not stay?”

“Yes.” The train pulls up at a station and beeps loudly as the doors open. A man gets out, no one gets on.

“I can pull him out, probably,” Kuroo says, watching the train doors close. “But these things have an effect, and I don't know where or when he’ll show up.”

“So he might not be the same.”

“No.”

Akaashi considers this for a moment, but he has spent the last few months in search of someone who might not exist anymore. He has been chasing memory after memory, in search of fleeting encounters that have led him to this point. Konoha might not be the same, but then what would Akaashi know, really? What does he have to lose?

“Will you do it anyways?”

“It might not work,” Kuroo warns. Akaashi studies the map of the subway, the lights flashing to tell him where they're stopping next. Circles, and still going nowhere. In between, poised on a precipice.

“At least we tried,” he says, finally. 

Kuroo exhales deeply next to him.


	2. finding reality

_I am almost someone going home.  
_ — Anne Sexton, A Story For Rose On The Midnight Flight To Boston

* * *

Time is a strangely fluid thing—how slowly it passes when you are waiting, how quickly it slips by when you're not looking.

Kenma had texted to say it worked, that Kuroo had managed to find Konoha.

Kuroo calls him, and says it kind of worked but he’s also not really sure. _It’s also really up to Konoha,_ Kuroo had said.

Akaashi waits.

A day passes, then two. A week.

Akaashi is waiting, for something or someone. For Konoha to show up, a phone call from his mother. Some indication that it had worked, that he had been right, that Konoha wanted to be found, that he had been found.

But he wonders again if he had been right to do this, when Konoha had chosen to disappear.

_Coming back is hard._

What if Konoha never came back at all?

It’s Konoha who comes to him, in the end. he shows up at Akaashi’s flat in the middle of the night and Akaashi lets him in, no questions asked. It’s raining and Konoha looks blurry at the edges, as if he is still reaching through space and time, as if he might disappear anytime at all. His hair is damp and his mouth set in an unhappy line, but he toes off his shoes and steps in without a word. Akaashi makes tea and they drink it in silence over his dining table, Konoha’s hands wrapped around a mug as if it is the only thing tethering him to the here and now.

There’s hardly anything to say, even as Akaashi traces the rim of his mug. He doesn't understand and Konoha doesn't want to explain, but he thinks he understands enough after spending the last six months tracing Konoha’s footsteps for the last few years.

In the end, he just lays out the guest futon and a towel. “Help yourself to anything you might need,” he says. Konoha looks transient, like he might disappear again. Akaashi doesn't know if he’ll still be there in the morning, but he only bids Konoha good night.

Leaving is easy. Konoha has proven that already.

Konoha’s still there in the morning. He looks exhausted, like he’s barely slept, hand wrapped around a mug. He looks like a stranger, his gaze fixed on something beyond what Akaashi could see. Akaashi knows he should tell someone that Konoha is here, that there’s no need to look for him anymore.

Instead, he puts the kettle on and sets about making breakfast, eggs and leftover rice with miso soup. They eat in silence, then Akaashi washes up while Konoha stares at his houseplant. It fills him with a vague sense of guilt, so he waters it before grabbing his things.

“I’ll be back around six,” Akaashi says. “Help yourself if you need anything.”

Konoha is missing when he gets back. Akaashi’s apartment is small, so it doesn't take very long to determine he isn’t anywhere within its confines.

It worries him, until he turns around and finds himself face to face with Konoha, who has his head tilted in silent query.

“I couldn’t see you,” Akaashi says. He feels very helpless right now, shoving his hands in his pockets so he doesn't grab at Konoha just to reassure himself.

“I was here the entire time,” Konoha says.

The words make Akaashi still. The implications of the words are terrifying, if he stops to think about it. But Konoha is here still, for now at least. Akaashi takes a deep breath to ground himself.

“I’m going to start dinner,” he says quietly. “Do you want anything in particular?”

Konoha shakes his head, almost translucent in the light.

Akaashi has always had restless hands; it’s a habit he can't quite seem to shake, especially when he’s lost in his own head as often as he is. With Konoha, it manifests as abortive touches, a tentative reaching out that turns into a different gesture altogether. It’s irrational to think that if he keeps touching, Konoha will become more real somehow, look less like he will slip away between one breath and the next.

Konoha doesn't comment on it, though Akaashi is certain he has noticed. One of the reasons Konoha had been so effective and capable was because he'd been observant, able to see a lack and make up for it.

When someone is constantly looking for cracks, maybe it's not so surprising that he'd found one, and then slipped through it.

It's the same now, as a day, then three passes. Konoha simply fits himself around Akaashi's space, like it's a sort of habit. Akaashi wants to tell him that he doesn't have to, but that would be saying something he's not entirely sure that either of them want to hear yet.

Konoha doesn’t want to talk, toeing the line of being here and not. He doesn’t seem to have decided between being here and not, like a lingering ghost. So Akaashi buys more groceries instead, takes out the garbage, doesn't speak to Konoha beyond a soft murmured _bath is ready_ and _I'm off now_. He leaves the spare key out with some money in case Konoha wants to go anywhere, but it remains untouched on the kitchen counter. Akaashi doesn't know what he should do in this situation, but he knows that Konoha needs space and time to adjust. 

He just hopes that Konoha won’t disappear again.

He comes back to find Konoha sitting on the floor, the box of his things open, impassively flicking through his old school notebooks. The Fukurodani jacket is carelessly tossed on the floor, other assorted knick knacks scattered around him.

"You kept my things," he says, looking up.

Akaashi pauses in the middle of taking his jacket off. "Your mother did," he corrects gently. "I just borrowed them."

Konoha stares at the notebook in his hands, and snaps it shut abruptly. "She should have thrown it all away." He is careless as he drops everything back in the box and folds it shut, pushing it back into the corner Akaashi had been storing it. There is an unhappiness to the line of his mouth, a restlessness to the way he moves.

Akaashi wonders if he had done the right thing in bringing Konoha back, especially after the last few days.

“How did you even find me?” Konoha asks.

“I was chasing a memory,” Akaashi answers.

“You were chasing a memory,” Konoha repeats flatly. “Tell me, Akaashi. Am I anything like you remember at all? Do you recognise me at all as someone you used to know?”

Akaashi doesn’t know how to answer that. Konoha is exhausted and angry, but so is Akaashi. He’d be the first to admit that this entire investigation had been an exercise in relearning and reknowing someone he’d thought he’d known, but he supposes that also had amounted to nothing in the face of the real Konoha.

“No, I don’t. And if I thought I did, I was clearly wrong.” Akaashi’s words are equally flat, cold.

Konoha’s mouth is twisted in a bitter line, his jaw tight as he looks away from Akaashi.

“You are free to leave, Konoha,” Akaashi says. “You don’t have to stay here, and you’ve already made it clear that you can leave if you want.”

The silence that hangs between them feels like it stretches between each inhale and exhale, each rapid heartbeat and they look at each other. The look Konoha gives him is careful, measured, and terrifyingly blank.

“Maybe this was a mistake,” Konoha says. 

“Maybe it was,” Akaashi agrees. It feels like one now, to think that if he found Konoha that it would be the end of it, that this story would have a happy ending. He’s forgotten that Konoha had made choices, can make choices that would mean Akaashi never sees him again. But he is so tired, suddenly. Konoha can decide what he wants; Akaashi doesn’t have to bear witness to it. Instead, he puts the kettle to boil, hands curling around the edge of the kitchen counter as he studies the gloss of the kitchen cabinets. He should start making dinner, he needs to do the laundry, tomorrow he needs to finish that report for his supervisor and update a case file.

The click of the door closing is the loudest sound in the world.

He doesn’t hear from Konoha at all in the coming days.

He doesn’t think about the boxes in his living room, the spare key on the counter and the folded money under it, the leftovers in the fridge because he’d made too much again.

The file with Konoha’s name printed on it remains in his desk drawer, quietly accusatory. Akaashi ignores it in favour of the new case he’s been assigned to, trying to find a housewife who hadn’t come home after a trip to Hokkaido.

It’s easier not to think about it at all.

His phone is ringing; he swipes to answer it absentmindedly.

“Akaashi Keiji,” he says.

“Akaashi-kun?” The voice is familiar, but he can’t quite place it. “It’s Konoha Hanako, Akinori’s mother.” 

“Konoha-san. How may I help you?” He feels vaguely guilty that he hasn’t told her that he’d found Konoha, but he didn’t want to make her hopeful only to disappoint her again, especially now Konoha has left again, and Akaashi doesn't know where he’s gone.

“He’s home,” she says, the words soft with wonderment. “My son is home, Akaashi-kun.”

Ah. So that’s where Konoha had gone then. Something in his chest loosens, a knot of worry that had taken up residence ever since Konoha had left. Tokyo can be an unkind city; Akaashi knows this from having lived all his life in this place. But he supposes Konoha would know this as well, perhaps even better than Akaashi does.

“Thank you for finding him, Akaashi-kun,” she says. She sounds like she’s crying, and he can almost see her sitting at her dining table again, where the afternoon light floods in from the window.

“I was just doing my job,” he answers gently. There’s murmuring on the other end and Akaashi wonders if it’s Konoha, if he’s seeing what Akaashi had seen those months ago.

Konoha’s mother’s voice is steady again when she returns to the line. “Thank you, Akaashi-kun. For bringing my son home to me.”

“It was my pleasure,” he says.

When he gets home that evening, he packs up Konoha’s things and makes arrangements for them to be sent back.

He doesn't know why it feels like a loss when these things were never his to begin with.

Konoha’s file is still on his desk, waiting to be processed. It’s easy enough to fill in the appropriate forms, check the correct boxes. _Konoha Akinori. Found alive. Currently residing with his parents at the following address._ He just has to hand the file over, and the case will be closed. He’ll have to write up a report for his supervisor, but beyond that, Konoha is no longer his concern.

But Konoha lingers in his mind, still looking like he’s ready to slip through the cracks. Akaashi wonders where he is now, if he’s being fussed over by his mother, or if he’s taken off again, hopped on another train to some far off place.

It makes him think of all the things he’s put off because there was always something more important at that time—a meeting, a paper, a case to solve, someone to find—all things he can barely remember now, for all their purported importance then. The work is endless, if he lets it take over.

Somewhere there's a list of all the things he’s always wanted to do, places he’s always intended to see—all the things that have slipped through his fingers. Still slipping through his fingers, because he has not reached out to take hold of them.

He files a request for leave when he turns in the file for processing. His supervisor’s been pressing him to clear it anyways.

In Akaashi’s line of work, it can be strange the kinds of people who go missing, and those who come looking or asking. Akaashi has solved many cases involving children and young adults, some with middle-aged men who’d lost their direction and old folks with one foot in the spirit world, but Konoha’s case had been the first one that had gotten personal, the first case where the subject had been of his age.

People disappeared all the time. Akaashi knows this, but he’d never expected someone he knew to disappear. He’d found Konoha, but he wonders what he’s lost in the process of finding, or if he is imagining the ache under his ribs.

Akaashi finds Konoha at the river near his parents’ house, watching it flow. He doesn’t acknowledge it when Akaashi sits down next to him, but he turns to look at Akaashi after a while.

“Shouldn’t you be at work?” Konoha asks. Akaashi shrugs.

“I’m taking time off.”

“I see.”

They sit in silence for a while, and it’s not really the comfortable kind. His thoughts churn as he rubs his knuckles, suddenly restless. He’s not sure if he should apologise for the not-fight, for assuming too much, for not asking enough. There are so many questions he wanted to ask Konoha but had been too afraid to ask. Where did he go? How did he find out about these cracks? How did he slip through them? What was it like? What about now? Was he going to leave again? He looks so pale and tired, has he slept at all?

In the end though, he asks none of these questions, doesn’t push Konoha for answers. “We could go somewhere,” he ventures.

Konoha glances over, face absent of any emotion beyond tiredness. Then he turns his gaze back to the river and Akaashi waits. He knows how to be patient, and right now it’s what Konoha needs. But he thinks of what he’s learned so far, about beginnings and ending, going around in circles, how he’s here again, sitting next to Konoha. Existing in between, the way Konoha had kept moving in search of something, or somewhere.

“Where are we going?” Konoha asks, his gaze set on something far away. Akaashi wants to say _anywhere_ , but it doesn’t feel like the right answer to the question.

"We can't move backwards," Akaashi finally says. His hands are still in his lap, unusual in itself. "Not backwards, only forwards."

Konoha only looks at him, careful and guarded. Akaashi does not know what to make of his expressions. Konoha now is not the Konoha Akaashi has found in the spaces he had left behind. It is not the Konoha Akaashi remembers from high school. Konoha here watches him with a careful expression, the space between them weighed down by the past, the present, and the possibility of the future. He doesn’t know how to read this Konoha, or how to cross the distance between them.

“Then don’t look back,” Konoha says. As if it is that simple, as if the past doesn’t weigh them down. Akaashi doesn't know what to make of this. They go around in circles, but they don’t go back.

“Where are we going?” Konoha asks again, quietly.

He takes a deep breath, glancing over at Konoha. “Anywhere,” he says.

“Anywhere?”

“Anywhere.”

They take a slow train to Hitachinaka. Akaashi watches the mountains and paddy fields speed past them. Planting should have just begun, if he remembers right. Or maybe it’s time for harvest. It reminds him of his grandmother’s house in the country, nestled at the top of the valley so he could see the farmland for miles around, fields always busy growing something.

Across him, Konoha is quiet. Neither of them talk about the night Konoha had left or the weeks that had passed between their last meeting. It’s not a conversation they are ready for yet. 

And yet, here they are on a journey together. Akaashi had picked Hitachinaka on a whim, so they’d gone to the station and took the next train out. No further plans, no consideration for where they’ll spend the night. They’d just set off, and something about that had felt freeing.

Konoha has his eyes closed, leaning back against his seat. Akaashi wonders if he’s imagining that Konoha seems almost translucent, like he’s fading away again.

Akaashi wonders if maybe Konoha has trouble staying.

The weather app predicts rain, but the skies seem clear when they arrive. The park is something to behold, with blue all around them. The hills fade into the sea in the background, could be the sea if the sun reflected just so. Akaashi wonders why he’d never come before, when all around him flowers are blooming. There’s something to see every season, he overhears someone saying, clearly excited.

He can see Konoha walking ahead of him, pausing every now and then to take it in. Akaashi catches up to him, and they wander over the hill to be greeted by more blue, seemingly endless before them.

“It’s beautiful,” Akaashi says.

Konoha nods in agreement and they wander around the park, following the trail marked out. Akaashi has never seen flowers like this before, and he wonders how much effort goes into growing and maintaining such a large expanse.

The rain starts, and Akaashi looks up. The clouds had gathered while he hadn’t been looking, and now a gentle drizzle that is more mist than droplets, softening the landscape. Mothers start ushering their children to the nearest shelter while other people shuffle along faster, afraid the skies will open up more.

Soon, it is just the two of them wandering through an endless expanse, Konoha slightly ahead of him.

The smell of rain and sun-baked earth, the soft haziness of blue on blue on blue, a lonely figure amidst it all. 

It could be a dream, Akaashi thinks. Or another memory, half-forgotten and slipping out of reach.

By the time the sun is setting, they’ve meandered over to the beach, shoes in their hands. The rain had stopped shortly after it had begun, leaving them slightly damp as they continued to wander through the park. Akaashi’s feet ache from all the walking they’ve done, and it’s nice to feel the sand between his toes, the way it gently gives as he walks.

Ahead of him, Konoha has his head tilted up, watching the sky get darker. Wispy clouds drift overhead, blown out of sight as the wind picks up. Akaashi’s eyes sweep over the lines of his silhouette, and wonders if you can etch longing into someone, the ache of it.

“I’m not sure I wanted to come back,” Konoha tells him, toes curling in the wet sand. “It seemed easier not to.” Akaashi thinks he looks even more blurry here, more likely to fade away. Caught in between the land and sea, sky and earth, day and night. So he reaches out and grasps Konoha’s hand in his, as if it would help ground Konoha here, remind him that this is where he exists now.

“But you did.” He squeezes Konoha’s hand in his, and Konoha squeezes back, like Akaashi’s the only thing that’s still tethering him here.

They go to Aomori next. Konoha seems to know where he’s going, so Akaashi follows his lead and doesn’t ask questions. He remembers December, when he had come and it had been blanketed in snow early for the season, how he didn’t understand what Konoha was looking for here. But now Konoha is here, and Akaashi thinks maybe some of the pieces are falling into place.

They find themselves at a park overlooking the bay, sitting on a bench while the wind tugs at their hair. 

“I came here in December.” he tells Konoha. Konoha gives him a blank look.

“Why on earth would you do that?” he asks, finally.

Akaashi shrugs. “I wanted to see what you saw, I suppose.”

“In winter. In one of the cities that’s renowned for heavy snowfall,” Konoha presses.

“Well, when you put it like that.” Akaashi laces his fingers together, fidgeting. “Perhaps it was not my best idea.”

“And here we all thought you were the smart one.” Konoha sighs and shakes his head, a hint of a smile at the corner of his lips.

Akaashi shrugs delicately. “I found you, didn’t I?”

Konoha considers that for a moment. “I suppose you did.”

It’s surprisingly easy to stop paying attention to all the things Akaashi once thought were important. He doesn’t check his emails, his phone is left on silent more often than not. Instead, he watches the mountains appear and disappear as the train speeds past them, flat paddy fields give way to houses and taller buildings, the clouds that breeze past them. Mostly, he is watching Konoha.

It is spring easing into summer and it makes Akaashi think of springs past, the start of the school year and the reshuffling of club members and new recruits, the first steps of building and rebuilding into something simultaneously old and new.

He is doing that again now, only it is not a club. Only now it is his conceptions and perceptions, the assumptions he made and kept. Konoha should be familiar ground, but he thinks with each step he takes he is learning how wrong he was.

In between conversations and silences, Akaashi learns new things about Konoha. How he holds himself, almost drawn up with a tension. How still he is, where most others have nervous habits that give them away. How spare his actions, how precise they are. How terribly, horrifyingly easy it is to lose sight of him, if Akaashi stops looking.

All these things he takes and remembers, files away. But he thinks, some things are still the same. The small quirk of his lips that came before a smile, the watchful eyes, the tilt of his head. Small things Akaashi hadn’t known he’d remembered until he’d seen them again, and a sort of quiet ache for all these half-forgotten things.

He buys a map and a highlighter when they stop in Sakata, marks out cities and train tracks just to see where they’ve been so far. He doesn’t mind, but he wants to remember even just a little, so that he stops losing all these things.

The rain falls and melts into the rivers, flowing out to sea only to return again. Akaashi traces the paths they have taken with his finger, if only so he can remember better.

“Were you unhappy?”

Yodogawa is a messy meeting place of other rivers, flowing from Lake Biwa and the mountains of Kyoto and eventually into Osaka Bay. Akaashi remembers vague history lessons on the significance of it when Kyoto had been Heian-kyo, how it had formed the lifeblood of the country then. Akaashi can’t imagine how it must have looked then, the river busy with boats carrying people and goods to and from, the communities and settlements that must have sprung up along these very river banks.

How lively it must have been then, how quiet it is now save for the sound of rushing water and the wind in the trees.

Konoha looks at him, almost thoughtful. “Does it matter?” he asks.

“It does to me,” Akaashi says quietly.

“Why?”

“I want to understand.” He wants to know why, wants to fill in all the missing pieces he doesn't have. Konoha had chosen to leave, but why? He was here now, but did he want to be? If he was still unhappy, would he leave again? Would Akaashi be able to find him again?

Konoha seems to turn the question over for a moment, and Akaashi waits. 

“I don't know,” he says at last. “I don't know if I was happy or unhappy. Or if it mattered at all. There were so many things that needed to be done or taken care of. Obligations, duty. Work, family. Everyone expected something.”

“Then why keep it up?”

Konoha shrugs. “Path of least resistance, I suppose.” His gaze is sharp when he glances over at Akaashi. “You should know.”

He supposes he does. Akaashi looks at his hands, fingers laced together. He’d followed the path set out for him because it had been the thing to do, and he’d never thought much about it because it was easy not to think of it when there were more immediate concerns. Paying bills, calling his mother weekly, laundry, cooking, work, work, more work. That perhaps it was not enough wasn’t something he’d wanted to examine closely then, but the more time he spends with Konoha, the clearer he sees the empty spaces.

Space is relative, and in all these distances they have been travelling, Akaashi is no longer certain of the space between them. The boundaries are blurring, the lines they’d drawn now softened into something much gentler.

In the quiet between them, Konoha’s words are slowly escaping him, helping Akaashi navigate this strange space they are in. Like memory markers mapping the shape of the past, he is learning again and again who Konoha is now from the words he speaks into their shared spaces. Fleeting moments after meals, during long train rides, in the deep quiet of the night when they're both aware that neither of them is asleep.

Tonight is one such night, with the streetlight shining through the thin curtains. It feels like one of those late night train rides Akaashi used to take, except now he has Konoha in front of him, instead of slipping through spaces like an afterthought.

As if sensing Akaashi’s train of thought, he starts talking. “It all seems like a distant memory now, like maybe something I dreamed happened.”

Akaashi glances over at the other bed, where he can just make out the shape of Konoha’s head from the light that slants in where the curtains don’t quite meet. He wonders if Konoha is looking at him, what he is seeing.

“Sometimes I feel like I'm still there. It was easier.” 

It is so easy to reach out, he thinks, to extend a hand to Konoha. So easy, and yet it feels like the bravest thing Akaashi has done in a long time.

Konoha’s hands are cool against his, fingers curling like the shape of longing.

“How so?” he asks.

Konoha seems to consider this a moment, his thumb tracing absent circles on the back of Akaashi’s palm.

“Everything was less, I suppose. Less fear, less uncertainty. Less feeling.”

Maybe it’s because they can’t see each other, maybe it’s because it’s late and they’re tired and it’s a time for confessions, but he can feel Konoha shifting across from him, though he doesn't let go of Akaashi’s hand.

“Do you wish you were back there?”

It’s the first time Akaashi has asked, too afraid of the answer before this.

In the dim light, Konoha’s hand tighten around Akaashi’s, fingers tangled together.

“No,” he says, and sounds like he means it for the first time. 

They’re going around in circles, tracing Japan’s coast through train tracks. Akaashi wonders what it might be like to do this journey by car, driving along mountain roads and highways, cutting through forests and mountains. They’d talked of doing a road trip once, during university, but coordinating schedules had been difficult and it never quite materialised. Now he’s trekking all over the country with Konoha, passing through cities and small towns alike, looking for something, or maybe somewhere. Perhaps they aren't looking for anything at all, and Akaashi is surprised to find he’s fine with that.

 _Coming back is hard,_ Konoha had said all those months ago, a fading memory caught between here and there.

Akaashi thinks he’s finally starting to understand what Konoha means.

“Are you happy where you are?” Konoha asks. Akaashi considers the question, pressing his fingers together.

“I suppose.” he says eventually. He’s content with the way things are. There’s the plant he doesn’t water nearly enough in his apartment, he rather likes his job; it’s an easy routine that he keeps to for the most part. It’s a kind of happiness, he guesses.

He tells Konoha as much, and Konoha looks contemplative, but he nods.

“That’s good then,” he says quietly. “One of us should be.”

Akaashi doesn’t quite know what to make of that statement.

Somewhere between Kanazawa and Tottori, Akaashi thinks Konoha seems better.

Not that there had been anything wrong with him—at least, not in the traditional sense, symptoms and illness and such. But he feels sharper, more solid and more grounded somehow, less likely to fade away. Less likely to slip through Akaashi’s fingers again, like he’s finally figured out how to stop existing in an in-between state and be _here_ instead.

Akaashi sees hints of the old Konoha he used to know surfacing, in the occasional smart remark, or when he drags Akaashi into a stationery store just to look at pens. It’s in the way he argues with Akaashi about how terrible konbini karaage is, citing them as a travesty against humankind. Or how he gets the yoghurt drink Akaashi likes but always forgets to buy, small kindnesses that have always come so easily to him. He's far from exuberant the way he had been in high school, but Akaashi wonders if perhaps that had just been Bokuto’s influence and his infectious energy. Framing and context is important, Akaashi knows. He’s just never thought about it like this before.

He catalogues these small things almost unconsciously, the playful smirk and the familiar gestures, rehashing old arguments Akaashi half remembers from a decade ago. It makes Akaashi smile when Konoha’s not looking, too absorbed in scribbling on scrap paper and comparing pen nibs before he decides he’s not buying them.

“How did you even know that the store was here?” Akaashi asks. They’re in a tiny side street, houses around them as they head back towards the main street. Konoha only grins at him.

“Google,” he intones solemnly, holding up his phone. “holds a wealth of information.”

Akaashi rolls his eyes at Konoha, and they find somewhere to have cold soba for dinner.

“I came here a lot,” Konoha tells him, when they’re in Yoshida, standing on top of a wall next to a car park. The river mouth here isn’t clean or pretty, a twisting mess of water and land trickling out to sea. “It made me think about what could have been, you know. What if I hadn’t done this or that, what if I’d been brave enough to do more.”

Akaashi studies it, the eddies of water streaming out. All rivers lead to the sea, wherever they may come from.

“But you wouldn't be you,” Akaashi says.

“What?”

“You wouldn't be you. The person you are now.”

“And what use is the person I am now?” he asks, his lips a bitter twist.

“I don't know.” Akaashi looks at his hands, fingers twisting together. “I don’t think it matters.”

It doesn’t matter, because Akaashi has fallen in love with the cloudy skies reflected in Konoha’s eyes, the curve of his hands around a pair of chopsticks, the cadence of his words as they talk about everything and nothing, the long silences that stretch between them even as they take another train to nowhere. There is no use for these things, but these are the things that make up who Konoha is.

“You’re more than the use you may have, Konoha,” he says quietly. “You’ve always been more than that.”

And maybe not all of the Konoha Akaashi had known was gone, making himself felt now in the sharp look he directs at Akaashi, the tight line of his mouth, the way he seems to deflate after a moment. He looks incredibly young suddenly, too tired for these years they have lived.

They stay there until light is only a suggestion on the horizon, Konoha’s hand in his.

“Where are we going?”

Konoha shrugs, but he pockets the tickets he just bought. Akaashi thinks it doesn’t matter really; he’s been content to let Konoha decide where they go. They stop at a konbini to get food and Konoha browses through the magazines, while Akaashi looks at the cover pages of the news. He feels oddly disconnected from the events splashed across it, as if it were all happening in a different world, not the same one he and Konoha inhabit now.

“You should go home.”

“Huh?”

“Home. Tokyo,” Konoha clarifies. “You have a life there.”

He holds out the ticket to Akaashi, the words _Tokyo_ printed on it. Their train is in fifteen minutes, and it will take them back.

It’s a reminder that this entire trip was a suspension of time, an in-between. Konoha will go back to his mother, who will fuss over him until he moves out again, life moving onwards. And Akaashi will go back to his desk, to his underwatered house plant, to his structured life where things are steady and familiar and expected, progressing neatly according to some unspoken plan or another.

Akaashi’s always been practical at heart. He was supposed to graduate, get a job, get an apartment, maybe a cat. If he’s lucky, he’d enjoy his job. He’d make enough money to be comfortable, take holidays now and then, travel a little maybe. He'd get married, have children. All the usual things. There are no grand ambitions to be rich, to be famous. He just wants something normal, something ordinary.

He’s not sure if that’s what he wants anymore, or if it had ever been something he wanted. Perhaps he’d persuaded himself, because that was what everyone told him to want. As the train speeds on back to Tokyo, Akaashi stares at Konoha's reflection in the window, feeling adrift as he had all those months ago.

His apartment is quiet, rooms stuffy from the heat but otherwise almost as he had left it. His houseplant is slowly wilting in its corner, begging to be watered. So he gets a bottle and waters it, until water pools in the plate beneath it.

He thinks of Konoha, gentle fingers brushing the leaves of the plant and the way it had perked up and seemed to grow the period before Konoha had left. Konoha, at the dining table with a cup of tea. Konoha, on the balcony while the sun set, his hair blazing in the dying light.

The empty apartment doesn't feel like home, he thinks. It’s simply a place he passes through, almost like a ghost himself. The room seems to sigh as if in agreement.

_Are you happy?_ Konoha’s question lingers, even when Akaashi goes back to work. There are reports to be filed, more cases to investigate.

He closes another case not long after, following memory to a girl who had gone missing years ago, now older and a little lost. But still, her family holds her like she’s still eight, like she had never left at all, like she has a space to return to.

It makes Akaashi think of Konoha again, if he was learning to pick up the pieces of his life now.

“Do you still want the same things you did when we were younger?” Akaashi asks.

Kenma shrugs. “I only really ever wanted enough time to play video games,” he says. “And for people to leave me alone.” 

“You know what I mean.”

Kenma pauses his game to look over at Akaashi, and Akaashi has to wonder if it really is that unusual, if it’s so bad Kenma’s decided he can’t multitask for this conversation.

“We grow up, Akaashi. What we want can change, as much as we do ourselves.” Kenma’s voice is flat, matter-of-fact. “Sometimes we outgrow the things we want. Doesn’t mean we didn’t want them, or that it was wrong to want them.”

His attention shifts back to the game, eyes narrowed as he concentrates. Akaashi mulls this over to the tinny sound of battle music, and wonders if he’s thinking too much about it again.

The pressing humidity of July persists into August, lingering until September. It’s easy to lose himself in the rhythm of work and life, all the things that he needs to do. With the typhoon winds comes a restlessness, a desire to be somewhere that isn’t Tokyo. It’s like a storm building up in him, reminding him of overcast days watching the ocean, the distant look in Konoha’s eyes, the feeling something is slipping beyond his grasp.

Konoha's birthday passes, and Akaashi wonders how he spent it, if there had been cake or if Konoha had taken another train out to nowhere, to stand on a shore where land and sea blurred, and he faded into it. Out of sight, out of reach again.

Akaashi’s fists clench around nothing.

Yukie takes a look at him and sighs. “You’re overthinking it,” she pronounces.

There is a busy cafe and it’s sunny overhead, still more summer than autumn. But the wind is cooler today, and Akaashi wishes he’d worn a jacket, or brought one with him.

Akaashi blinks at her, caught off-guard. “Overthinking what?”

She waves an absent hand at him. “Whatever it is you’re thinking about,” she says dismissively. She eyes him shrewdly, then goes for it. “It’s Konoha, isn’t it?” she asks.

“No,” he says automatically, but it’s not entirely true. In many ways, he has been thinking about Konoha. The train rides, the way the rivers melted into oceans, the slow inevitability of time passing. The present becomes memory and memory shifts and fades, until it is forgotten. “Yes,” he says. “I don’t know.”

It’s been a year, he thinks. A year since he’d started looking for Konoha, and in the process, he wonders what else he’s found, how it has changed him. 

“That’s a yes, Akaashi-kun.” Yukie has a faint air of smugness about her, but her expression softens. “I’m glad you found him,” she says.

“I’m not sure if I did.” The thought has haunted him, especially in these last months of Konoha’s absence after they returned to Tokyo. Akaashi’s hands curl around his drink, rubbing at the condensation on the glass. “It feels like I found someone entirely different, who only looks like Konoha.”

Yukie considers this for a moment, stirring her drink with her straw. “People change all the time, don’t they? We grow up, and we lose things as much as we gain them.” Her smile is touched with sadness. “None of us are who we were anymore, Akaashi.” 

They have all come so far, and in such different ways. He’d thought himself practical and realistic at seventeen but at twenty-seven, he thinks he had dreamed more than he’d ever realised. He wonders if his seventeen year old self would be disappointed in the twenty-seven year old him, look at his life now and find it lacking.

“I suppose not,” he says softly. He’s not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but in the wake of everything, he finds himself reevaluating many things he thought he’d been certain of.

“We’ve grown older, haven’t we?” he asks. Yukie laughs, short and tired.

“We certainly have,” she says wryly. “But that’s how it is, isn’t it? We grow up and change and move on.”

Akaashi makes an assenting noise, and the two of them lapse into silence. This certainly wasn’t how he’d thought he’d end up, but if someone asked him what he would change about his life now, he can’t think of anything he would really want to change. Things had unfolded this way, and perhaps if he were someone else, he might be disappointed. But then again, he’s never been one for grand ambitions and the like.

“I’m getting married soon,” Yukie says suddenly, twisting her hair between her fingers. Akaashi hadn’t even realised she was engaged, though now he knows to look he can see the slim silver ring on her finger, the subtle declaration. He wonders who her fiancé is, then feels guilty he hadn’t even noticed, let alone asked after it.

“Of course,” he says, because he’s trying harder now to be better, to let less things slip past him. “Will you be inviting everyone then?” he asks. He’s fairly sure that Yukie has kept in better touch with the rest of the team than he has, but it’s the first time in a long time he’d see all of them again.

“Well, I’ll need to give Bokuto a year’s notice and remind him every month to keep the date free, but yes. I’m going to invite everyone.” Her lips are curved in a smile, touched with a fondness that Akaashi hasn’t seen in a long time. “It’ll be nice to see all of you together again.”

“It would,” he says.

It’s a clear day in October when Akaashi figures out the way home.

The train ride is easy, full of students chattering on their way home from school, housewives getting groceries for dinner. He’d been like that, once.

Konoha’s mother doesn’t seem particularly surprised to see him when he shows up at the door. Akaashi wonders what Konoha has told her, or she has deduced.

“He’s in his room,” she tells him as he toes his shoes off in the entryway. He thanks her and heads for the stairs, listens to the house sigh secrets into his ears while the stairs creak in agreement, memories clinging to the surface of the wall as he passes it.

Konoha’s door is ajar, and Akaashi pushes it open after a gentle knock.

Konoha is sitting on the floor, surrounded by train tickets. He glances at Akaashi briefly then turns back to the tickets, gathering all of them and putting them back in their box.

“Let’s go somewhere,” Akaashi says. Konoha offers him the box and he pulls out a ticket.

_Okayama._

Leaving is easy, it’s always easy. Coming back is harder, and Akaashi wonders if Konoha’s found anything to come back for yet. He passes Konoha the ticket and Konoha tucks it back into the box.

“Are you going to stay in Tokyo?” he asks.

Konoha shrugs. “For now, I guess. Until I find a job.”

“Will it make you happy?”

“Does that really matter.”

“Yes, if it gives you something to come back for.”

“If I don’t ever find anything to come back for?”

Almost a year ago, Konoha had asked him a similar question. Then, Akaashi didn't have an answer for him. Now, Akaashi looks at Konoha then stretches his hands out, palms upturned.

All rivers lead to the sea, and all the moments that have been building between them bring them to now. A map, traced point to point, until it reaches its destination. Heartlines, crisscrossing the palms of his hands.

_What if I had been brave enough to do more?_

“Would you come back to me then?” Akaashi asks, quiet. His hands are shaking slightly, but they are open, reaching and waiting.

Akaashi has learned a lot about waiting, in the last year. He has learned about home, and open hands. Home maybe isn’t a place, maybe not a person. But a sense of belonging, a certainty that there is someone waiting for you to come back.

Konoha looks at him, startled. Akaashi waits as Konoha looks at his hands, upturned. 

But slowly, slowly, he puts his hands in Akaashi’s, and lets Akaashi pull him back.

He’s on the train home, a slow rattle at this turn and the speed up as they hit a straight stretch. He knows this journey, the sway of the train, the slow down as it pulls into the platform. Memorised it, made it sense memory, something his body can’t quite forget after years of following the same path.

Once, going home hadn’t been something that Akaashi had given thought to. It had simply been one of the things he’d done in a day, easy and natural as breathing. 

Now, he knows better. He has followed rivers from confluence points to muddy river mouths and open bays, north to south and east to west. He has traced the coasts of Japan in train tracks to find his way here. In doing so, he has learned about coming home, how easy and difficult it can be to find something to return to.

It’s a hundred thousand rivers flowing to the sea, a path carved over thousands of years. It’s tracing train tracks across the country, like the heartlines that run across his hand, across Konoha’s. 

Just like the river flows to the sea, Akaashi’s feet take him home.

The apartment is quiet as the door swings open, but Akaashi doesn’t mind. These days, he’s more certain of things and of himself. He finds Konoha on the balcony amidst half-empty pots and bare branches, crouched over the camellia bush.

“It’s blooming,” Akaashi notes quietly. Konoha nods, fingers careful around the flower.

Konoha stretches a hand out to him and Akaashi takes it. “Welcome home,” he says. Palm to palm, heartline to heartline, pulling him in, bringing him home.

**Author's Note:**

> kudos and comments appreciated. you can find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/ewagan)


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